I thought I would write this post in the spirit of #nurture1314 – starting with a confession! I used to be a bit of an OFSTED chaser – there’s a lot of it about. By that, I mean I used to spend a great deal of time distributing checklists, documents and ticklists to colleagues, about ‘what they had to do in order to be good or outstanding‘. Many of them were quite long and frankly, less than useful. Why? Well, teaching is a creative profession and these lists run the risk of shackling teachers to a format or style of teaching that does not suit them. More importantly, it has perpetuated some myths about styles of teaching that ‘work best’ and so must be adopted….often without any real evidence that they do actually ‘work best’.

To their credit, it appears that OFSTED want schools to move away from this ‘ticklist’ culture too. In the subsidiary guidance to the most recent framework, they have said the following:

This was a question put to me as I worked with a group of teachers this week. My answer was ‘No’. ‘But we are expected to mark everything in our school, so can you point me to the evidence that says that not every piece of work needs to be marked?’ So, another blog.

Some background to this. Schools have picked up on the fact that Ofsted inspections are making judgements about the quality of teaching over time. This is a good thing and takes away the notion that a 25 minute observation is the only evidence which is considered to judge the quality of a school’s teaching. But where it has gone wrong is that some schools are saying that every piece of work needs to be commented on by the teacher. This is not feasible and it doesn’t support learning.

Besides improving the quality of student work,being an opportunity to check (real) progress, reflect upon next steps, and being an opportunity to teach critical ideas to an audience of engaged students. What is the point of these time consuming assessment tasks?

For me, and for academic success, it’s cultural. It’s part of how classroom should be to help learning take place.

It’s easy to empathise with the novice student who is about to “volunteer” their work for a whole class critique. To them it

Towards the end of last term and at the start of this I have been looking to develop my strategies for ensuring students make the most of their feedback and hopefully therefore make the most progress.

Firstly, I think it’s important to say that none of the principles I am discussing here are new to my practice. All of the things I have done before. What I am really talking about here is ways of systematising what I do to make sure that as many students as possible can successfully close the gap between where they are and where they want to be.

One of the big issues with this is time and efficiency. This is especially true in my lower school

Ever since the idea of formative assessment was expressed by Dylan Wiliam and Paul Black in ‘Inside the Black Box’, one of the practical strategies suggested has been the formative use of summative tests. Typically tests are regarded as something given at the end of a unit of work; often they mark the end point of a learning sequence and provide information about how much each student has learned – or not learned. Left as a summative process, the students’ test marks merely become a record of their success at a point in time – without directly helping them improve. And obviously some students will actually know more than their test performance indicates.

However, used formatively, tests provide an important source of detailed, individualised feedback identifying where each student needs to deepen their understanding and improve their recall of the knowledge they’ve covered.

Have you ever flicked back through an exercise book and seen the same repeated comments followed with soul numbing certainty by the same repeated mistakes? There are few things more crushing to the spirit of hardworking teachers than this dramatically enacted evidence of the fact that, apparently, 70% of all feedback given by teachers to pupils falls on stony soil. I’ve seen my fair share of books like these. Heck! I’ve been responsible for more than my fair share of ‘em!

I’ve always felt guilty about marking. There’s always something to mark and when you’re tired and stressed it’s often the first thing to go. I got involved in a discussion on Twitter over the weekend where someone suggested that if you’ve got your planning

An essential part of Assessment for Learning is giving feedback to students, both to assess their current achievement and to indicate what their next steps should be.

Feedback is also ranked as the number one intervention strategy in terms of its influence on learning by both Professor John Hattie and the Educational Endowment Foundation: in other words, their wide-ranging researches show that improving the quality of the feedback that is given to students has the biggest impact on learning of any classroom intervention. Improving the quality of feedback can also lead to the greatest levels of progress amongst students. Indeed, the EEF suggests that quality feedback can add 8 months of extra learning. Hattie, meanwhile, says that feedback has an effect size of 0.73. To put that figure into perspective, the average effect size is 0.4 and the highest is 1.2.

There are a number of areas of my teaching practice that I’m looking to seriously improve this year and I’ve been writing about each aspect over the last few weeks. Perhaps of the utmost importance is feedback and marking. I am now entering my fifth year of teaching… crikey! I have been finding time after time that my marking has been taking me AGES. As an English teacher, it can soon stack up anyway but it was becoming an unmanageable beast. I was commenting and annotating and highlighting and target setting. Students would read it, sometimes ask me to discuss it and then it would be put to one side. I’d mark their next piece of work and the cycle would happen again. Nothing was done with the feedback and necessary changes weren’t being implemented. Even if I could cope with the fact my marking was taking me so long; it wasn’t being acted upon, therefore it may as well not have been happening at all.